Subtitle

Dearest community, another problem emerges: apparently, in order to highlight the fact that this is a second edition (even if in the minimalist sense we have envisaged: a new introduction, keeping the old one, all the original text with the re-proportioned graphs and the corrected typos – I await indications, and a substantial afterword of around seventy pages with around fifteen graphs, both new and updated), it seems necessary to modify the subtitle.

The previous one, I remind you, was: "How and why the end of the single currency would save democracy and well-being in Europe" (84 characters). It doesn't seem to me that this title has lost its relevance, quite the opposite! I'd say that the obvious blackmail to which "euro-centric" governments like Greece were subjected (in 2015, three years after the essay was published) has, if anything, added to the concerns expressed by that title, even though, as we've seen, the problem goes beyond monetary dimensions: just look at how "non-euro-centric" electorates like Hungary's were blackmailed with the threat of not receiving… your money! The problem of democracy exists and is broader, and the collapse of the monetary union remains a necessary condition but has never been a sufficient condition, even if the summary of the subtitle seemed to suggest so, and on this aspect at the time endless (and petty) controversies were unleashed by those who, clinging to the only thing they had read, imposed sermons on us steeped in a trite, cheap "whataboutism."

Indeed, the need to return to that subtitle, if only to eliminate its ambiguity, is undoubtedly a positive stimulus. It must also be said that after nearly fifteen years, the euro is still with us (may the Lord preserve it for us!): however, prosperity and democracy are increasingly less with us, the former crushed by the rigidities of Economic and Monetary Union, and the latter crushed by the need to quell the dissent that economic malaise naturally brings with it. We should probably start from here, that is, from the idea that we are sacrificing our future to the Moloch of an idea whose obvious risks were clear from the beginning (indeed, since 1957, as anyone who hasn't just read the subtitle knows)!

Do you have any suggestions?

Because you all long to do something: but the magic wand to make you disappear, when you need to be suspended for excessive petulance, is precisely this: asking you to do something…

(… I would stay within 80 beats …)

This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2026/05/sottotitolo.html on Fri, 01 May 2026 09:27:06 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.